DAO Structure
DSW DAO's organisational structure pulls inspiration from Haier's RenDanHeYi (人单合一) model and Vitalik Buterin's Convex and Concave decision making model, to create a structure that simultaneously promotes flexibility, efficiency and decentralisation.
View information about the core units of the DSW DAO below:
This system is optimised for efficiency-where-necessary and decentralisation-where-possible.
DSW DAO maintains that decentralised token governance must be the backstop to an on-chain organisation, however it can cause inefficiencies if all decisions must be decided upon by open governance. To ensure agility, we are combining autonomous "Pods" under the collective mission of DeSciWorld, with unique interactions and accountability structures.
We hope to foster the strongest possible entrepenurial spirits, bolstered by independent targets and budgets, to motivate high-quality autonomous contributions.
The Governors are the most decentralised portion of the DSW DAO, and the most powerful overseers of governance. Microbes NFT stakers are credited voting rights, as Governors.
Governors may vote on proposals submitted from only three sources:
the CORE team
the Dispute Court
from other Microbes Governors
The Governors will vote on key decisions such as CORE Team elections, large treasury unlocks, major strategy proposals and Executive or CORE Disputes.
At any time, an Executive or CORE member may raise a Dispute that is arbitrated by Governors.
CORE Pod members are elected on a biannual basis by the Governors.
CORE is responsible for the major strategic decisions of DeSciWorld. It will determine the overarching objectives of the Executive and Product Pods - as such, members must have extensive experience within this ecosystem.
CORE will:
elect and oversee Executive and Product Pod Leads
vote on budget proposals for Executive Pods
maintain an effective internal communications framework
handle internal disputes between Executive and Product Pods
establish strong industry connections
be a powerful spokesperson for DeSciWorld
Executive Pods have domain-specific responsibilites and will house the bulk of the DSW DAO contributors.
They are largely autonomous: they choose their targets, their management structure and their service users. Pods will regularly communicate with the other Executive Pods and CORE to synchronise and synergise.
Exective Pod Leads (elected by CORE) will organise their team and propose a monthly operating budget to CORE. They set their own KPIs and targets as a part of the budget proposal.
The core function of the Executive Pod is to provide an expert service to other Pods within the DSW DAO. They may also contract with outside organisations if there is spare capacity that the DSW DAO Pods do not fill.
Example: Design & Marketing Executive Pod
The desci.world Product Pod is planning a new campaign for the launch of v2 UX.
Rather than creating marketing materials themselves, or outsourcing, they can "contract" the services of the Design & Marketing Pod, who have resources and expertise that cover the entire DeSciWorld ecosystem.
This enables the Product Lead to focus solely on their product, keep the team small and lean, and have instant access to a very high quality design team.
Product Pods are the smallest sub-units within DSW DAO.
The Product Pod's responsibilities are:
create a strong product & brand identity
develop a specific communications strategy
conduct extensive market and user research
gather continuous feedback and propose improvements
Each Product Pod will contract the services of the Executive Pods for its materials and resources, facilitated by the Product Lead. Leads are elected by CORE, and will manage their own product team and their own targets. The Product team is given a fixed budget but may propose more when needed. Hiring for the Product Pod should occur internally, with Executive Pod members been "loaned out" to Product Pods for a temporary period.
The Dispute Court is the "fail-safe" option to prevent internal capture and arbitrate disputes.
At any time, Executive Pod members or CORE Team may propose a Dispute to the Court. The Dispute will begin with a private, internal forum in which CORE and Executive Leads may discuss the issue to reach a solution before it goes to governance.
If unanimous agreement cannot be reached, then the dispute is escalated to Microbes Governors vote.
Rationale
DeSciWorld is an ambitious ecosystem with plans to continuously ship exceptional user-facing products for years to come. As such, there are many movings pieces that require some level of centralised authority to keep within an acceptable efficiency bracket.
However, for many reasons, we are committed to decentralisation and therefore must develop the structures to uphold that accountability to the public.
Vitalik's prescient identification of this conflict between efficiency and decentralisation in DAOs can be seen below:
"One natural question that one might ask is: isn't this kind of "DAO" just rebranding the traditional concept of multi-layer hierarchy?"
Two things that can help ensure that an organization built this way will actually turn out to be meaningfully decentralized include:
A truly high level of autonomy for pods, where the pods accept resources from the core and are occasionally checked for alignment and competence if they want to keep getting those resources, but otherwise act entirely on their own and don't "take orders" from the core.
Highly decentralized and diverse core governance. Normally, broad and diverse participation is a large tax on efficiency. But if (1) is satisfied, so pods are highly autonomous and the core needs to make fewer decisions, the effects of top-level governance being less efficient become smaller.
This second point here, "diverse core governance", is something that cannot be snuffed at. We are excited to bring broad, distributed governance from Microbes Governors, diverse leadership from the CORE team, and limited centralisation for focused ecosystem development through the Pods.
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